KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) is announcing that it has begun shipping their new lineup of CM6 (enterprise) and CD6 (data center) Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state drives. The latest PCIe 4.0 specification was designed to double the performance of storage and server systems, enabling data transfer speeds of up to 16.0 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), or 2 gigabits per second (Gb/s) throughput per PCIe lane, driving new performance levels for enterprise and data center applications.

KIOXIA is an industry leader in developing PCIe and NVMe solid state drives, and was the first to publicly demonstrate PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and is now the first to begin shipping these new next-generation SSDs. Both the CM6 and CD6 Series comply with the latest NVMe specification, and include features such as NVMe-MI­™, shared stream writes, namespace granularity, and persistent event log. Also, both the CM6 and CD6 Series conform to SSF-TA-1001 (U.3), allowing them to be used in tri-mode enabled backplanes, which are able to accept SAS, SATA or NVMe SSDs.

According to Jeff Janukowicz, IDC’s research vice president, “A new wave of storage technology is coming with the introduction of PCIe 4.0 devices that will bring next-generation performance to enterprise and hyperscale data centers. SSDs, such as KIOXIA’s CM6 and CD6 Series, will help enable customers’ transitions to PCIe 4.0 and grow PCIe SSD unit shipments to over 50% of the enterprise market.”

The CM6 Series of enterprise NVMe SSDs are dual-ported for high-availability, delivering best-in-class sequential and random performance of up to 6.9 GB/s and up to 1.4 million IOPS. This equates to bandwidth improvements of up to 2x as compared to PCIe Gen3 predecessors, and are up to 12x faster than SATA SSDs. The CM6 Series is offered in capacities ranging from 800GB up to 30.72TB. This provides 50% more capacity and 23x more throughput than the highest capacity hard disk drive (HDD), in barely 1/4 the space.

The CD6 Series of PCIe 4.0 NVMe data center SSDs are single-ported for servers, and are geared toward large-scale data center deployments, as well as general-purpose usage scenarios that include cloud computing, database, virtualized and containerized environments, web servers and media streaming. The CD6 Series is offered in capacities ranging from 960GB to 15.36TB, with 1.0 million IOPS and 6.2GB/s throughput.

Both the CM6 and CD6 Series include a wide range of encryption and security features, including Self-Encryption (SED) and FIPS, and are on the UNH-IOL Integrator’s list for NVMe 1.4 device compatibility. Also, the CM6 Series has passed PCI-SIG Workshop compliance.

Alvaro Toledo, KIOXIA America’s vice president of SSD marketing and product planning, states that “For more than a year, OEM customers have been providing cutting-edge storage performance to end-users thanks to KIOXIA’s CM5 and CD5 Series NVMe SSDs. We’re continuing our commitment to lead in the NVMe space by delivering that fastest available 2.5″ PCIe 4.0 SSD solutions.”